


For Small Creatures Such as We

by Mount_Seleya



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asperger's Sherlock, Character Study, Internal Conflict, John Can Be An Insensitive Jerk, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Not Beta Read, Not Britpicked, POV Second Person, Retirementlock, Sherlock Has The Soul Of A Poet, Sherlock Holmes Has Feelings, Sherlock Loves John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 14:23:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2776289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mount_Seleya/pseuds/Mount_Seleya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yours has always been the story of head meeting heart. It just took longer than it ought to sort out which one of you is the heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Small Creatures Such as We

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."  
-Carl Sagan, _Contact_ , Chapter 24

When you first propose moving to the cottage in Sussex, you flounce about the sitting room, grandly pronouncing that you've finally grown tired of the bustle of London, the streets thronging with stupidity and filth.  
  
Your hands flutter in the air like restless birds, ruffle through the wiry, salt-and-pepper riot of your hair.  
  
John looks up at you from his laptop with a small, bemused smile, and you stop.  
  
His eyes have caught yours, and now your heart is straining against your ribs, your lips slack and quivering. Sometimes looking at him is like looking at the sun. Too much and yet not enough. Time seems to still, seconds stretching into minutes, and the chattering chaos of your mind narrows to a single pure thought.  
  
_John._  
  
Once, you would have tried to crush the flower of warmth his soft, nakedly fond gaze opens in your breast. _Sentiment_ , you would have named it, your eyes cruel quicksilver and your mouth twisted into a sneer.  
  
But this, this golden feeling that engulfs you body, mind, and soul, is no mere sentiment. It is the vast, improbable cosmos, with all of its strange and terrible beauty, pouring into your chest and filling you with light.  
  
"John," you say, blinking. His face wavers with the sudden wetness in your eyes.  
  
John rises to his feet, guides you down into your own chair, stroking a winter-rough palm across your cheek.  
  
"Tell me more about Sussex," he urges gently.  
  
"I want to keep bees," you begin. "I want clean, crisp air filling my lungs, and stars trembling above us every night."  
  
"Oh, love," John breathes, and then his lips are scraping across your jaw, dry and soft.

 

* * *

  
You remember the first time the ineffable elegance of the natural world impressed itself upon you. It was in the shell of a snail, a tiny, delicate curl not unlike the scroll on the violin you had received the Christmas previous. Plastic cutlass in hand, you knelt at the bottom of the front step, watching the snail glide across the rain-damp concrete.  
  
And then the door burst open, and Mycroft's fat foot in its clean, white trainer came down like a guillotine.  
  
_Crunch._  
  
In that instant, your mind flashed to nautiluses, to that strange thing Mummy called the golden ratio. To Daddy's long, sun-flushed fingers flying across the keys of his piano, spiralling out notes as he bounced you on his knee.  
  
"Mummy's set out some biscuits," Mycroft announced as if nothing was wrong.  
  
But _everything_ was wrong. You knew this, felt the wrongness brimming in your chest, choking the air from your lungs. And it was just so much, that feeling, so huge and crushing, and you couldn't shape it into words.  
  
So you jerked your tear-filled gaze up at Mycroft and howled and slashed at his knee with your toy sword.  
  
"You little beast!" he hissed, stumbling back.  
  
Mummy took you to talk to someone. And you talked and talked and talked, until the magic faded from the world, and you learned to reason away the things you felt, to hide them behind your mask and never look at them.  
  
You decided to be a sociopath at fifteen. It seemed preferable to being human.

 

* * *

  
You can pinpoint the precise moment in time when the man the world knew as Sherlock Holmes breathed his last. That mad dark prince who chased murder through the night and dwelt in a towering fortress of cold intellect.  
  
It was there, outside the door of 221b, when Mary in her red coat and blue gloves raised her gun and fired.  
  
You fell to your knees in a swirl of black coat as John crumpled back onto the ground. Cupped his face with your huge, black-gloved hand and turned it toward you, seeking his eyes and finding them clouded with pain.  
  
"No, no, John, _please_ ," you begged.  
  
"Sherlock, listen," John wheezed. "You need to stay calm."  
  
The words were strained. Huffed out between desperate, panting breaths.  
  
Mary gloated above you for a moment, something about "Jim," about your heart burning on the "good doctor's" pyre. Then she was gone, leaving you alone on the pavement, sobbing and helpless and _ruined_.  
  
"You can't, John. _You can't_."  
  
That's how they found you, a couple of minutes later, pleading and weeping and rocking his limp form in your arms. Purposeful hands peeled you away from him and lifted him onto a stretcher and rushed him off into an ambulance. You stumbled onto your feet, your heart a yawning maw, your fingers twitching uselessly at your sides.  
  
You watched Lestrade exchange a few hurried words with Donovan. Then Donovan was shepherding you into the sandwich shop, sitting you down in a rickety chair, forcing a styrofoam cup of tea into your hands.  
  
Her eyes, as they skated over the wreck of your face, seemed to be seeing you for the very first time. "All we can do now is wait," she told you, reaching across the table and lightly resting her hand atop your forearm.

 

* * *

  
You hadn't expected his anger in the months that followed. Hadn't expected him to just sit there in his armchair every evening after coming home from the surgery, jaw tense and eyes distant, a glass of whiskey clutched tight in his fist.  
  
"I'm sorry," you found yourself saying with startling regularity.  
  
But all that ever got you was a bitter laugh, a cracked, wheezy sound that stung your heart like a swarm of bees.  
  
Finally, foolishly, you told him.  
  
"I'm fairly certain I'm in love you, John," you confessed, "and I don't know what to do."  
  
"So we feel things now, do we?" he shot back.  
  
"I've always felt things," you answered, barely more than a breath.  
  
"You've done a bloody good job of hiding it, then, haven't you? Made yourself into the perfect machine."  
  
And you don't know what pulled you down onto your knees at the foot of his familiar red chair. Made your hands reach out blindly, desperately, your fingers curling around his wrists, holding onto him like a lifeline.  
  
"I know what I feel, John," you said, voice quaking. "I understand if you don't reciprocate. But don't make me deny it. _Please_. Don't make me pretend not to feel. I can't bear it, John. I can't bear to be a machine when I love you so acutely."  
  
For a moment, John said nothing, just blinked repeatedly and swallowed. Then he shook his left hand free of your grasp, moulded it around the long, angular hollow of your cheek and flicked away a falling tear with his thumb.  
  
"Oh, Sherlock," he murmured, and then he was collapsing over you, whispering kisses against your temple.

You learned how perfectly your hips fit his hands that night. How your body parts like water flowing around a stone when he pushes inside you slowly, so slowly, until you shiver and weep with the rapture of it.  
  
Because you were made to fit together, weren't you, clichéd as that sounds? You, who has always felt so much and struggled not to feel anything, and he, who has always felt so little and struggled to feel everything?

Yours has always been the story of head meeting heart. It just took longer than it ought to sort out which one of you is the heart.

 

* * *

  
You find his spectacles on the kitchen counter. He leaves them there, sometimes, after bringing in the post. As always, you scoop them up in your large, knobbly-fingered hand, carry them into the sun room.  
  
It's easy to sneak up on him from behind as he clacks away on his laptop and lower the spectacles onto his head.  
  
"Thank you, love," he says, tilting his gaze up at you.  
  
The angle is too awkward to allow for a proper kiss, but you dip down nonetheless, press your lips to his forehead.  
  
"They're meant for reading, you know," you gently reproach.  
  
"I'm writing at the mo," he replies.  
  
At that, a deep, rumbling laugh bubbles out of you. "You know what I meant."

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a number of wonderfully insightful Johnlock metas that I've read lately. Notably [loudest-subtext-in-television's](http://loudest-subtext-in-television.tumblr.com) recent observation that Sherlock has a "[big shimmering heart pulsating with poetry](http://loudest-subtext-in-television.tumblr.com/post/104662156769/smejzjedajeudnf-i-love-that-you-tagged-that-the)."
> 
> From my first viewing of the show, Sherlock being a gentle, loving, beauty-craving soul below the façade of ruthless intellect was my headcanon, and then series three pretty much went and made that reading into canon.
> 
> This is the first time I've ever explicitly written Sherlock as autistic. It's been implicit in some of my past fics, but it wasn't a central element of my characterization of him, nor was it relevant to the story as a whole.


End file.
